


These Things We Have

by DontTapTheGlass



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Ghosts, Home, Inanimate Objects, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Worth, Self-Worth Issues, The Hargreeves Need A Hug, The Moon - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-29 17:27:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18298835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DontTapTheGlass/pseuds/DontTapTheGlass
Summary: We are a collection of moments and things and words. Do not forget that.or: There are things that the Hargreeves cling to.





	These Things We Have

**Author's Note:**

> hello yes i wrote this in one sitting and i am my own editor. you have been warned.

\/\/\////

We are a collection of moments and things and words. Do not forget that.

/\\\/\\\

               Luther had a small potted plant on the moon.

               Pogo sent him the seeds and some supplies after the first year, a little note ( _Dear Master Luther, I thought you might appreciate a friend up there. )_ attached. It had been three months since Luther had heard from his father and even longer from any of his siblings.

               Luther scoffed at first and left the supplies tucked in the back of a cabinet.

               When he caught himself carrying conversation with one of his spare helmets, he decided that Pogo was probably right.

               He plants the seeds and waters them every morning first thing. If he’s being honest, he’s not sure what type of plant it is, but it’s not like it matters. It’s just something to pass the time. Realistically the plant will probably die. It doesn’t matter.

               It’s a plant. A damn plant. He remembers when he was a kid he used to poke fun at Ben and the little cactus he kept on his window sill – (“It’s name is Spinely.” “What the hell kind of name is Spinely?”) – and rolls his eyes at Pogo’s sentiment in the gift.

               It’s a plant.

               When he first sees a spark of green poking its head out of the soil, he almost cries with pride.

               He talks to the little sprout – not because he’s lonely, but because he heard that it helps plants grow, okay? – and watches as the little bud in the soil pokes its curious little head out at the world. He tells it about Allison and her marriage and how he isn’t jealous because that isn’t right but he’s also a little jealous because _why wasn’t I enough_? He tells it about Klaus and how after Five disappeared he started smoking pot and taking pills and how after Ben died he _spiraled_ and left the house in a flurry of anger and sorrow and fear like a tortured animal. He tells it about Diego and how he sometimes felt that he should’ve been better to him when they were kids. He tells it how he doesn’t think he’s ever going to be able to repair that relationship, and it hurts, sometimes. He tells it about Dad and Mom and Pogo and their training and missions past. He tells it about the way the sun hits the Earth in such a way that the entire planet _shines_.

               He does not tell it about Vanya. He forgets.

               He doesn’t name it. He does _not_ name it, okay? He figures it’s probably a philodendron plant or something – he thinks he remembers Pogo talking about wanting to grow those at some point – and it’s hard to talk to something when you just keep calling it “It” or “Plant” or whatever, so it’s not really that the plant is _named_ Phil, but really it’s just like Luther’s calling it what it is.

               When Phil begins to wilt, Luther panics and sends Pogo all but an emergency message. He might not have been able to help his siblings like he thought he was going to, but they all left, so maybe that’s not his fault. But if Phil dies, then that’s on Luther.

               He feels lighter when Phil begins to perk up again.

               When dad dies, Luther sits in his trailer for a very long time. He’s going back to Earth. He’s going home. He’s going to see real people again. He’s going _home_.

               He starts to cry. He doesn’t know why he does that, but he sobs and sobs and throws shit around the trailer and screams and acts like a downright child.

               After his tantrum, he found Phil flipped onto the floor, pot broken and stem snapped.

               A second wave of grief hit him and he sobbed all over again.

               He left for Earth the next day.

///\\\\\///\\\\\

               Diego leaves home when he’s eighteen.

               He stumbles around for a few years before he finds the place at Al’s – runs around on the streets, joins the police academy, lives with some friends for a few years, gets kicked out of the police academy, you know, the usual.

He isn’t sure what to do with his own space: he’s never had anything to call his own before.

               He keeps the rickety table and chair he finds in the alleyway and buys a mattress for fifteen bucks off some guy in a pinch. The tools Al left in the back get organized and tucked away in the meagre tool bench, and posters advertising fights and knife throwing competitions he’s in get thrown up on the wall. He finds a few spare blankets, uses one as a table cloth, one as blinds, and one as, well, a blanket.

                 The shelves start to fill up with knick knacks and dishware. He finds a dresser and a mirror at a garage sale, buys a microwave and a water purifier for cheap. The tool bench turns into a knife station, the nook with his bed becomes his bedroom thanks to the curtain he’d strung up to divide the room. He frames one of mom’s cross-stitches – the one with his mask and knives and his name – and puts that on the wall as well.

               It isn’t much. He definitely wouldn’t bring any girls back here – they’d probably figure they were going to get murdered if he even tried. It’s still a boiler room, there’s no denying that, but if anyone were to enter they would have the keen sense that they’re intruding.

               His room back home was always bare-walled and empty. The most personal thing in the room was the damn chair he dragged in for when Klaus and Ben would fall asleep in his bed and he’d sit all night watching over them. Maybe that room was “Diego’s room” but the only thing that made it such was his continued presence in it for eighteen years. In fact, that entire fucking house was only his home because there was nowhere else to call home and, fuck, at least mom was there.

               But now he has a new home and a new family that’s really just some angry old boxing man and two detectives that only _mostly_ like him the majority of the time.

               But he’s okay with that though. It’s enough.

//\//\\\

               Allison forgets Luther’s necklace when she leaves.

               She thinks maybe it doesn’t matter once she sees the ring that Patrick gives her – a big diamond-inlaid thing that must’ve cost at least a hundred times as much as Luther’s gift – but after Claire and the divorce and the fall-out of all that, she realizes that maybe the money put into it isn’t what matters: Claire makes her a bracelet of macaroni and it feels like its worth ten times as much as that stupid ring.

               When she returns to the mansion, that stupid fucking house that suffocated her and her siblings, and finds the necklace again, it doesn’t feel the same. Something was lost in the years she was gone. Luther was lost off in space all alone, she was lost off in Hollywood, their siblings were all lost in their own coping mechanisms and traumas.

               It feels empty. _She_ feels empty.

               But then there are people attacking the house and her sister has some weird boyfriend and _Five is back_ and the world starts to feel a little fuller.

               It’s like the necklace and the ring: something was lost then something was found. She lost them and then found them and now they will save the world.

//\\\//\\\\\\\\\\\

               Klaus watches his life pass him by.

               He clutches needles and pills and dollar bills and anything that will sell and anyone that will take favors for any of the above. He lives his life in a haze of highs and comedowns and rehabs and insistent spirits reaching out hands that he knows can’t touch him but still scares him to death.

               When he stormed out of the house at age sixteen spewing insults and threats and things he knows he can probably never take back, all he had on his person was a pack of cigarettes, some fancy silverware from the dining table, and Ben’s stupid fucking worry stone he used to fiddle with in the pocket of his uniform. He sold the silverware, smoked the cigarettes, and ended up losing the worry stone sometime between kissing the boy with the bright red pills and waking up in his bed.

               After his first overdose, Ben showed up, visible to only to him but not bloodied like the others but _holy shit Ben Ben Ben Ben_ and from then on, he had Ben.

See, material objects weren’t really something meant for Klaus. Half the people he met in his life weren’t people he could touch or hug or beat the shit out of, and the other half seemed to be so insistent on taking the permanent things and handing back the semi-permanent. For about two years he had a little backpack of things that were really truly _his_ but after four days that Klaus can only half-remember through the haze of heroin and drink his backpack went missing and that was the last time he had anything.

               Sometimes Diego would pick him up and take him back to his apartment that was really a boiler room (and who the fuck is Klaus to judge?) and he would make Klaus eat some microwavable rice and sleep in his bed while he watched over him – _just like when they were kids, aww, that’s so cute, Diegooo._ He has a little stash of clothing in Diego’s dresser and a rainbow mug that Diego dubbed as his. It makes him warm, but also makes him embarrassed. This is all he has.

               Then Five came back. Then came Hazel and Cha-Cha. Then the briefcase. Then _Dave._

               Then… well, then _not_ Dave and…

               Well, now he has dog tags.

//\\\\\\\/////\\\\\\\

               Five has Delores and Five has guns and Five has blazers and school-boy shorts and cups of coffee and notebooks of equations and–

               In the future, the one he wants to change, all he had left were _things_. All that was left when everyone died was the stuff they collected and the bodies they once lived in and wasn’t that fucking depressing?

               Five became a collector. He dragged wheelbarrows of shit halfway across the country just to prove to himself that he could, but when things fell off the wagon, he didn’t even pause. He only really cared about the eyeball found in Luther’s hand, as far as _things_ went – well that, and Delores, but even then, she was more of a product of loneliness than anything else that made him keep her. He knew she wasn’t able to speak, wasn’t even able to breathe, but he also knew he wasn’t able to let her go.

               When he came back to his siblings, he wasn’t sure what to do with the newfound abundance.

               He focused on coffee and drink and _food_ – fuck, he was never eating canned food ever again. He looked around the mansion full of excess and riches and just _shit_ and pictured it all torn apart and caved in and burning and –

               Nothing was permanent. That is what he learned.

               And the _things_ – the _stuff_? That shit didn’t matter. When he thinks about it too hard, he starts crying, because that stupid fucking house and the objects contained inside were _nothing_ in comparison to what he had thought he’d lost when he came to that wasteland.

               He looks around at the six people he’d fought so hard to get back to.

               And that? That shit _did_ matter.

//\\\\\\\\\\\///\/\////

               Ben has Klaus.

               Plain and simple. Cut and dry. Ben had a body somewhere five feet under and a statue in the courtyard that didn’t really look like him, but, really, he only has Klaus now.

               He drifts behind his brother as he ruins his own life almost purely out of spite. Ben is never quite angry but he’s always disappointed. Ben used to have so many things but now he just has Klaus; Klaus used to have Ben and now he has a drug problem. He isn’t sure which has it worse.

               Ben doesn’t blame himself, not really, because how the fuck could he blame himself for dying? But he does blame their father. Ben knew they would all end up torn apart – both as a family and as individuals – but as a mere observer of the world he can no longer touch, things seem so much worse than he ever imagined.

               He watches Klaus pop pills into his mouth and disappear.

               He sighs.

               He has Klaus.

\\\\\/\/\/\/\////

               Vanya’s violin used to belong to someone Reginald loves.

               She isn’t quite sure when she learns this, but she remembers looking down at the violin at a young age and knowing it was something so holy that she could only play if she would do whoever that someone was justice. Reginald was not a good man, she knew that, somewhere in the back of her mind, but this person who once held this violin? They were the _best_ , she could just feel it.

               Once upon a time, she thought that if she played well enough, became _extraordinary_ at the violin, she could have a family like the rest of her siblings. She knows things were always tense between them at the best of times, but she also knew there was genuine love and trust between the rest of them. Her? It seemed like they only put up with her on the best of days.

               She remembers when she was little, Five used to sneak down to the kitchen with her and make the dumbest, most sugary concoctions they could fathom. Thus was born the marshmallow sandwiches. There are moments like this tucked into her childhood, so she figures if nothing else, she has memories.

               She also has pills. Her mind is scattered on the best of days. The only time when things make sense anymore is when she plays. She has a violin that used to belong to someone Reginald loved.

               She used to think maybe she could be loved.

               Klaus told her once when they were twelve that a woman appeared whenever she played. He said that she loved her music. He said he felt the same. The next day dad took him to training and he came back three days later with a permanent jitter and he never said another kind word to her again.

               She has a violin. She has memories. She has pills.

               Then, she has Leonard.

////\\\\\\\\\/\/\/\//////

               Seven extraordinary children are thirteen and thirty all at the same time.

               Five falls exhausted into Ben’s shoulder and sleeps for hours while Allison and Klaus fuss over Vanya. Diego and Luther keep watch for Reginald, a loaded silence between them that says everything. None of them want to be apart tonight. There’s too much potential for loss.

               The Hargreeves children come to learn that unexpectedly, they’ve had each other this whole time.

/\/\//\//

**Author's Note:**

> scream with me @tripleforte on tumblr


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